Severed head found on Hopewell golf course identified 24 years later

HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP — On March 5, 1989, two golfers at the Hopewell Valley Golf Club found a severed female head near a stream on the 7th fairway. On April 4, 1989, The Trentonian reported that the head had tested positive for AIDS. On March 26, 2013, Hopewell Township Police announced that the head has been identified as Heidi Balch of New York. She was 25 when she was killed.

According to authorities, Balch is believed to have been murdered by serial killer Joel Rifkin, who murdered as many as 17 women from 1989 to 1993, but was only convicted of murdering nine. He is currently serving a 203-year sentence in the Clinton Correctional Facilty in Clinton N.Y. No additional charges are being pursued against him.

Following the discovery of the head, the Mercer County Medical Examiner determined that Balch had been killed and decapitated hours before the golfers found her remains.

During the first year of the investigation, several composite sketches and facial reconstruction models of the victim were made in an attempt to identify her, but each was unsuccessful. Later in the spring of 1989, a pair of legs were found in a stream in Jefferson Township, some 80 miles north of Hopewell. Authorities were able to match the legs to the head in Hopewell using DNA testing.

The Trentonian would earn national notoriety for running the headline “Head had AIDS” in a story about the case. Reporter Darlene Weiner wrote that the victim “may have avenged her own death if the murderer was splashed by her blood.” Then Mercer County Prosecutor Paul Koenig Jr. had confirmed the claim in the headline. As for the reporter’s prophecy, in 1997, the New York Daily News reported that Rifkin had tested positive for HIV. Rifkin, who was known to have had a preference for killing prostitutes, responded to the story by trying to sue New York corrections officials and the Daily News for leaking confidential information about him.

Following Rifkin’s arrest in 1993, detectives questioned him about the remains found in Hopewell and Jefferson townships. He indicated that he remember picking up a prostitute named “Susie” in New York City, killing her and putting her remains in streams of New Jersey. Rifkin also said that the woman may have been his first victim.

Nearly two and a half decades would pass with authorities considering several missing women as the owner of the mysterious head and legs, but the DNA would not match. According to Hopewell police, they would periodically reopen the case to try and crack it.

In 2011, Lt. Tom Puskas, Sgt. Bill Springer and Detective Mike Sherman dug into the cold case. They looked into prostitution arrests by the NYPD in early 1989 and were able to identify a woman similar to the unidentified victim’s description, but the report contained numerous aliases and other inconsistent information. Finding the true identity of that woman and finding her family took several more months.

Earlier this year, Detective. Sgt. Steve Urbanski from the New Jersey State Police’s Missing Person’s Unit found a missing person’s report that matched the prostitute from the NYPD report’s description. The report showed a photo of Balch from 1987, she was reported missing in 2001 and was last seen in 1995. It turns out that the last seen information was erroneous.

On March 5, 2013, 24 years to the day Balch’s head was found in Hopewell, the now Acting Lt. Springer and Detective Sherman met with Balch’s aunt in New York City. The woman reported Balch missing in 2001 and the officers left the meeting feeling like they had the woman identified.

Later this month, Hopewell police obtained DNA samples from Balch’s parents living in Florida and Maryland, respectively. They matched the 24-year-old remains.

Other agencies who assisted in the search for Balch were New Jersey State Police forensic anthropologist Donna Fontana, the New York State Police and the FBI.